In a message dated 6/17/2015 8:30:33 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es writes:
Dear Steven and FIS Colleagues, Your message has arrived to the list perfectly: fears are unjustified. There is no censorship in this list --and never will be any (well, as the movie tells "never say never again"!). Anyhow, I would dis-dramatize the discussion. The Vienna conference has been very exciting and full of oral discussions that somehow continue now. Quite many of those good ideas have been rediscussed in the exchanges of these days. However, for my taste, the essential connection between information and life has not properly surfaced yet. hb. have you seen Guenther Witzak's When Competing Viruses Unify or my book The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates? both have clues to the relationship between information and life. mere clues. but a good start. The explosion of complexity in the living and the explosion of complexity in modern societies is clearly depending on information and communication flows (or whatever we may denominate). Comparatively with the complexity of merely physical systems, there is no point about that. Apart from following the physics, most of the alternative approaches so far discussed go for the discursive, conceptual domain as the place where information should be ascertained... What if information belongs to action, hb: good question. what is the relationship between information and action? what is the relationship between stimulus and response? another topic in The God Problem. to the adaptive changes arranged by the living and socioeconomic agents, to the tentative advancement of their life cycles, to the difficult achievement of their fitness in an ever changing environment as communicating members of bigger entities and societies... then we are leaving that action track of life just as a fragmented scenario of multiple specialized points of view--or tying it unpropery. As Goethe put in Faust "At the beginning was the deed" Helas not the Verb! In Vienna I agreed with Marcin's pragmatic approach to the "liquidity" of information. Maybe it is too long to argue, and sure he can do better than me. But getting to terms with the factic undefinability of the term may help quite a bit to the practice of information science research by people with empirical and naturalistic orientation. hb: from The God Problem: "information is anything that a receiver can decode. Information is anything a receiver can translate. Information is anything that a reciever can understand. Information is in the eyes of the beholder." how do we know when information has hit home? stimulus and response. action. the verb. One should not feel forced to define a fundamental concept (on a pair with "time" and "space"--basic forms of information indeed) hb: this is intriguing. how do you interpret time and space as information? they do tell particles where to go. and particles respond by moving. is that it? plus a cohort of other "impossible" related terms (meaning, knowledge, intelligence) hb: from the god problem re the meaning of meaning: "If meaning is anything that a receiver can understand, if meaning is anything that an entity can interpret, if meaning is in the eye of the beholder, then how do you know when a thing or a person “understands” something? Follow the B.F. Skinner rule. Watch his or her behavior. Watch for the signs of stimulus and response. Watch to see if the receiver does something in response to the stimulus. Watch to see if the receiver moves. Quarks exchange meaning with stimulus and response. So do gas whisps competing to swallow each other. And so do would-be planets using their gravity to snag and cannibalize comets and space debris. How do we know the receivers get the meaning? All of them respond to the signals they receive. They move. They move toward each other." one more word. from the work of Valerius Geist, author of Life Strategies. all communication comes down to two elements: attraction cues and repulsion cues. in order to practice good info science research. Acknowledging that, could be a first step to achieve a consensus on some basic principles of information science that would allow the disciplinary construction and all the multiple diversity within. It will take time and patience. So, our "market of conceptual exchange" should continue unabated. Particularly, continuing the debate on the 4 th Great Domain of Science can help us to have a big picture where our more immediate, particular goals might one day dovetail. hb: i'm a newcomer to these discussions. what is the fourth great domain of science? with warmth and oomph--howard Best --Pedro PS. The servers of University of Zaragoza are terribly sensitive to spam suspiciousness, even my own messages have been rejected occasionally. I can do little about that. Steven Ericsson-Zenith wrote: > Dear Pedro, > > My fears appear justified, the FIS server has begun bouncing my posts. > > I wish to say the following: > > > I fear that I may risk the life of a child, in addition to encouraging > additional irrational calls for banishment, by adding simple > encouragement to this point of view. I essentially agree with the > points that Marcus makes. The essence of which, I believe, is that > many endow the notion “information” with an existential status beyond > its due. A role that it is patently ill equipped for. > > He is right to highlight how the notion of information is being > shoe-horned into the gap caused by the epistemic crisis that now > appears across science. Serious consideration of the context, why this > crisis exists in the first place, is required. In large part it is, in > my view, because of the neglect of natural epistemology and > existentialism in science. > > I would also point out that this crisis is apparent in the words of > many modern physicists. Who have argued things like “falsification is > unnecessary” and “falsified theories are not fundamentally wrong” - in > addition to pursuing nonsensical physics in which they make egregious > mistakes. > > The simplest examples of these mistakes being 1. the idea of “multiple > universes” (that appears to simply be a misuse of English) and even > “The Big Bang” as a creation theory (leaving room for all kinds of > nonsense, including naive conceptions of “God”). > > The problem in general is, I fear, the “shut up and calculate” > generation - who have focused upon complex purely mathematical forms > and forgotten the necessity to include humanity and all life in its > considerations, and - as a consequence - they have sacrificed the > simplicity and pragmatism of science. > > The fault lies in part, I know, with the Logicists, distracting us > from the bridge building required between pure mathematics and the > physical sciences, advocated first by Benjamin Peirce (1809-1880). The > focus upon binary valued systems, entirely discredited by Godel (to > whom we listened poorly), has not served us well. > > Regards, > Steven > > > -- > Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith, Los Gatos, California. +1-650-308-8611 > http://iase.info <http://iase.info/> > -- ------------------------------------------------- Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA) Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ ------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ---------------------- Howard Bloom Howardbloom.net Author of: The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History ("mesmerizing"-The Washington Post), Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century ("reassuring and sobering"-The New Yorker), The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism ("A tremendously enjoyable book." James Fallows, National Correspondent, The Atlantic), The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates("Bloom's argument will rock your world." Barbara Ehrenreich), How I Accidentally Started the Sixties (“Wow! Whew! Wild! Wonderful!” Timothy Leary), and The Mohammed Code (“A terrifying book…the best book I’ve read on Islam.” David Swindle, PJ Media). Former Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute; Former Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University Founder: International Paleopsychology Project. Founder: The Group Selection Squad; Founder, Space Development Steering Committee. Board Member and Member Of Board Of Governors, National Space Society. Founding Board Member: Epic of Evolution Society. Founding Board Member, The Darwin Project. Founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab. Member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology. Scientific Advisory Board Member, Lifeboat Foundation. Advisory Board Member, The Buffalo Film Festival. Editorial board member, The Journal of Space Philosophy.
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